


Miss Private

by Chash



Series: Together, They Fight Crime [2]
Category: Provost's Dog - Tamora Pierce, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-12
Updated: 2014-07-12
Packaged: 2018-02-08 13:44:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1943376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chash/pseuds/Chash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A day in the life of Beka Cooper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Miss Private

**Author's Note:**

> We're starting off pretty slow in this verse, I'm still getting a feel for the characters and the settings. Also, the romance won't kick in for a while, which is weird for me. 
> 
> But that reminds me! I've gotten the impression Beka's love life is not always the most popular, but I'm a fan of her canon romance, so our end game in this will reflect that. Sorry, Rosto fans.

Summer means Beka is back home.

Not Eleni and Myles' house. She's grateful to them, to be sure--she and her brothers and sisters never could have stayed together if they hadn't taken them in. But the tidy house with the lovely garden doesn't feel like where Beka belongs, any more than Corus Academy does. It's all too clean and too nice and too _rich_.

Beka's the kind of girl who feels most at home in the bad part of town.

George calls it a hero complex; Beka doesn't think it's as fancy as all that. She just feels more like herself when she's in the rougher parts of the city. It's where she grew up--where almost all of the Coopers, George included, grew up--and she knows how it works. After a year of living in dormitories and rubbing elbows with the rich and famous, walking into her old neighborhood and knowing she'll be there not for a few hours, but for _months_ , feels like waking up.

"You're cracked," George tells her. He provides lunch for her; Beka knows Eleni and Myles will worry if she doesn't check in with them periodically. "Seriously. What do you even do all day?"

Beka shrugs. "What did you do all day?"

"I know you're not doin' what I did. You're not a little delinquent."

"No," she agrees. Beka's gotten in more trouble for obeying the law than she ever has for breaking it; she had a reputation as a goody-two-shoes that hasn't been improved by her new lot in life. "I've been getting to know Aniki and Kora."

"And Rosto."

"You don't have to say it," Beka says. "I know he's bad news sure as you do."

"Not that the girls aren't bad news," George says. "But he's ambitious. And a flirt. I know the type. I _was_ the type."

"Your concern is appreciated," Beka says. "I can take care of myself. Do you have any old bread you want to get rid of?"

George shakes his head with a smile. "You're all Cooper." He tosses her a bag. "Just be careful, alright? I don't want to have to tell Ma somethin' happened to you."

"I'm always careful."

Her first stop after lunch is the park, to feed the pigeons. It was something she did with her Pa, before he died, and she's glad that even though she was gone for a year, the birds still flock to her.

"I'm coming, I'm coming," she mutters. "I can't feed you if you don't let me through."

It gets her some odd looks, but she's used to that. The Coopers have always been kind of a weird family, and she's stuck out even as one of them. And moving in with Aunt Eleni didn't help with that. Part of why she likes Rosto, Kora, and Aniki is that they don't treat her with the uncomfortable mix of resentment and pride that so many of her former acquaintances do. The three of them are new to the city too, and they don't know who Beka used to be.

The pigeons start a fuss as someone approaches. Beka expects them to scatter, but they don't. The girl approaching walks through them carefully, and they seem more curious than afraid. Beka is curious too--she knows the girl, recognizes her from holiday meals with Aunt Eleni, but it takes her a minute to place her. Daine, Alanna's friend.

She sits down next to Beka, giving her a smile. "Beka, yes?"

It's alright if she looks at the birds, not at Daine. But she still has to lick her lips to get her mouth working. "Yes." And then, because she has to know, she forces herself to add, "Did George send you to check on me?"

Daine laughs. "Not exactly. I told him I'd seen the pigeons following a girl around the other day and he told me it was you."

"They knew my pa," she says. "They liked him, so they put up with me."

"How old were you?" Daine asks. "I never knew my da, but I was ten when my ma died."

Beka licks her lips again. One of the pigeons, the one she calls Slapper, gets annoyed that she's stopped feeding him and comes to club her with his wings. She tosses the bread crumbs farther away, and he hits her once more for good measure before he hops off. "Six when Pa died. Twelve for Mama."

"I'm sorry," she says, soft.

"I'm glad Aunt Eleni could take us," says Beka, automatic. She's said it so often that it isn't hard, not even to say to strangers. She practiced saying it. It's true, but it still sticks in her throat. It's hard to be glad about anything that happened because Mama died.

"I went into foster care," says Daine. She's not looking at Beka either; one of the birds is pecking at her fingers, but she doesn't seem to mind. "I can't say I recommend it."

"No. We--me and my sisters and my brothers--were terrified that would happen. We wouldn't have gotten to stay together."

Daine takes some bread, breaking it down into tiny pieces and scattering it. Beka has to smile; she knows how small she has to break it down for them. "George says you're here almost every day after lunch."

"I try to, yes."

"Would you mind company? It's nice to get a break from work."

Beka looks up at her sharply. Daine's looking back, calm and friendly, and Beka can't maintain the contact. She turns away, blushing. "Are you sure George didn't put you up to this?"

"As if George could get me to do anything I don't want to do," she says, with a soft snort.

Beka can't help smiling. "Then no, I wouldn't mind."

*

"Heard an interesting rumor about you."

Beka's heard more than a few rumors about Rosto too. No one knows exactly where he and his girls came from; they moved in while Beka was at school, and she got to know them over visits on the weekend, well enough to get pretty comfortable talking to them. They're fun, for all they're crooked and Rosto is a flirt.

"Which one?" she asks evenly. "I'm out of touch with rumors, not living here full time anymore."

"The one about you taking down a gang when you were just a little thing. Eight, was it, Kora?"

"Nine, I thought."

"Well, either way." Rosto drapes his arm around her shoulders; Beka shrugs it off. He's too old for her, eighteen or nineteen, at least, and she's pretty sure he has a thing with Kora _and_ Aniki. It's more complications than she's looking for, even if Rosto is good-looking. "Is it true?"

"I didn't take them down," she protests. "I just found out what they were doing and told the police."

Rosto snorts. "Oh, yes, that's so different," he teases. "You didn't take them down at all."

Beka gives a quick shrug of her shoulders. "The police would have found them sooner or later. I just helped make it sooner." One of them had hurt her mama. There hadn't been a choice. The hardest part had been finding someone who would listen to her; the cops she'd found on the street thought she was trying to distract them from another crime in progress. The ones at the station dismissed her out of hand. It had been luck that she'd eventually gotten to Deputy Commissioner Gershom, and that he'd believed her and followed her tip.

"No wonder everyone's so afraid of you," Rosto comments. "I thought it was just your eyes. Feels like someone walking over your grave, when you scowl at a person."

"If you don't want to feel like that, stop pulling her tail," Aniki comments. "She never glares at me."

"Now, why would I want that?" Rosto asks. "I like her glaring at me. Makes a man feel appreciated."

"You're cracked," says Beka.

"It's been said," says Rosto. "Come on, we're going to get a snack. I'll even buy yours."

"I can afford to buy my own food," she grumbles. "Don't think you're doing me any favors."

"Oh, Cooper," says Rosto, shaking his head. "I would never."

*

She's always home in time for dinner. Aunt Eleni asked, and it seems like the least she can do. And it's not like she doesn't like being home and being with the rest of them. But Aunt Eleni married Myles and moved up in the world, and she's happy for it. Her brothers and sisters are in good schools, getting good educations, and she couldn't be happier for them. It's everything Mama wanted for them and thought they'd never get. But none of them have looked back at the slums they came from. They're done with it, and Beka can't help thinking that there are other people who need help. She's all for anyone who wants to getting out.

But she wants to stay and make it better, and the rest of her family doesn't really understand it.

"Beka, you're filthy," says Diona. "What have you been doing?"

Beka looks down at herself; she and Aniki were practicing Shang throws Alanna taught her, and she ended up grass-stained and bruised. It was a great afternoon. "Brawling," she says, unapologetic.

"Honestly, you could _pretend_ not to be a common thug anymore."

"Aw, leave her alone," says Will. "She's no more a thug than Alanna is."

Beka hides a smile. Diona wants to hate Alanna for being, well, Alanna, but she knows that if not for Alanna, Aunt Eleni never would have met Myles, and they wouldn't have been as lucky as they were after Mama died. But Diona still can't _like_ Alanna.

"Please, let's not fight before dinner," Eleni says. "Or after dinner. I'd prefer we keep fighting to a minimum." She smiles at Beka. "But you could clean up. I've worked hard on the food, and it tastes best without dirt in it."

Beka flushes and ducks her head. She's known Eleni her whole life, but she's gotten shy around her since they moved in. It's too strange and new, knowing Eleni like this. "I will," she says.

She changes her shirt and washes her face and hands; there's a bruise on her arm Aniki apologized for, but Beka doesn't mind it. She goes to the Shang Dojo for classes with Kel on Saturday, but it's different from _fighting_ , the kind she did when she was living in the slums, the kind that doesn't have rules. She misses that.

Maybe Diona's right. She might be a thug at heart. Maybe that means she'll be better at dealing with the other thugs.

She doesn't have an official curfew, but it's mostly because she doesn't push. She stays in after dinner so Eleni and Myles won't worry. And, if she's honest, she knows she's too young and too green to be wandering around dangerous streets alone at night, especially when she has trouble minding her own business when she finds trouble. It's better to stay home and safe for now, until she can do more.

She's got an email from Kel, who's in Japan visiting her parents, and one from Tansy, who's on vacation with her boyfriend. Beka can't imagine being seventeen and being so serious about a boy (after only a few months) that she wanted to travel with him, but Herun seemed like a nice enough sort, when Beka met him. And Tansy has always been much more taken to wild emotions that Beka is. She's not looking for love right now, anyway.

Even if Rosto _is_ handsome.

Her bedroom is cool, which is just another thing she can't get used to. It was sweltering today, hot and sticky, but here she is in air-conditioned bedroom in a safe neighborhood. It should make it easier to sleep, not harder, but it just reminds her that this still isn't home.

But tomorrow is another day. She and Aniki are going to visit the Dojo to see if they can get some practice in with Alanna. Daine is going to come when she feeds the pigeons. She's got change for the kids who look hungry, and Myles is always willing to give her more.

It's going to be a good summer.


End file.
